Picky, picky, picky

Scientific publishing is not for the faint of heart or the delicate, sensitive personality. The blog title pretty well describes the reviewers, the editors, and scientific journals: picky, picky, picky. Reviewers start with the assumption that the authors are drooling idiots who don't know the first thing about the research they have labored over, and probably don't know the pertinent literature either, and odds on no one knows statistics better than they. You really come to appreciate constructive reviews however rare. Editors are chosen to he picky hard-asses it seems, bent on maintaining scientific standards, meaning the science they do as opposed to the science you do. And the rules and regs constructed for journals makes your basic immigration process pale by comparison. Yet, in spite of this, it does seem to work out, and the Phactor has not had nearly so bad a time as all this, except for that one time, oh, and that other one, and a couple of more here and there, although the next to last one was the biggest breeze in my entire career (yea!). The most recent paper involved editorial demands to keep jumping through ever smaller hoops, and then gaining some small satisfaction when some of the changes insisted upon by the editor, which seemed at odds with the journal's own format instructions, were changed back (yes, the authors got it right!) by the copy editor, but it doesn't do to point such things out. So after all this masochism of doing and publishing science, there is a certain sense of satisfaction for getting a manuscript done, submitted, reviewed, and revised, today! And if the stoopid editor doesn't swoon in delight over these efforts, well, the Phactor will probably do what they ask, meekly.